{creating} our dream house part iii

Our kitchen has been . . . nightmare. I don’t really care too much about our kitchen, to be honest. I had to tell myself that when it came down to an insurance claim and I wanted to pay the money to just buy all new cabinets instead of getting the same that have been in the house for the past 20 years. Sure, it’d be nice to have a nice little showroom Ikea kitchen, but let’s be real, I’d rather have an Ikea studio than kitchen . . . and so I did.

This would be the before of our kitchen. Note the dirty off-white linoleum floor with the giant rip down the middle from the previous owners having tried to move the refrigerator without putting something down to protect the floor (*note!). No matter what I did to that floor, it never got clean. It just didn’t. So, if nothing else, I got a new floor out of the deal.

Maybe I should explain – we had a slow leak under our kitchen sink for who knows how long. Lots of Lovely black mold and who knows what else was growing under there, so, they had to rip out the floor, scrub down the joists and replace all of our lower cabinets. Because we’re poor (and I don’t care about this particular kitchen) we just got cabinets that matched the uppers – because what are the odds we’re going to replace the uppers anytime soon to match? Slim to none. And so, we got new (albeit matching oak) cabinet lowers which are actually really well-made in comparison to what was there before, and I got to choose a nice DARK floor that will hide the mess. Once the floor was in I realized that nice green ‘accent’ wall, wasn’t a very nice accent anymore, and so it got painted with chalkboard paint.

Here’s the thing – this chalkboard paint is kind of driving me batty! Does it just not ever get clean?! I used both an eraser (not a good idea) and a wet rag, and when it dries, it just goes back to being dirty. Ugh. Oh well, the kids will Love it!